Modern cable companies deliver high-quality digital video and audio to the customers. In some homes, a single incoming cable feed is connected to more than one television with use of a splitter. The more the incoming signal is split and rerouted, the more the overall speed and quality will suffer. The picture can become grainy and snowy, or blurry ghost-like images can appear.
To ensure the signal quality is sufficient, CATV cable amplifiers are used as outdoor active components to provide signal gain and boost the signal strength of the CATV signal. This results in a better quality of the television reception picture and improves the speed and reliability of the signal. CATV cable amplifiers are now generally used to supply analogue/digital cable television but also triple play services like Internet, Video on Demand and Telephony.
The amplifier only boosts the strength of the signal and should not add additional noise to the signal. The amplifier also minimizes the signal loss caused by a long distance between the outdoor amplifier and the wall outlet inside the costumer house. The amplifier can also improve equalization across the frequency range, and some outdoor amplifiers provide bi-directional signal gain. This is used to sent back information (data) to the cable company, for example, the return path is used for Internet and Video on Demand.
The outdoor CATV amplifier is located in an outdoor cabinet. Traditionally the amplifier is only accessible by sending a technician to the outdoor cabinet location to service the amplifier. However, more and more outdoor amplifiers are remotely configurable. Whilst this allows many aspects of configuration of the outdoor amplifier to be managed from a distance, for example, from a Head-End location controlled by the cable service provider, difficulties arise with the power supply integral to the amplifier. Such power supplies are designed with the use of electrolytic capacitors. These capacitors have a low “Mean Time Between Failures” (MTBF) compared to all other components used in the CATV amplifier. They are thus likely to fail sooner than any of the other components associated with the amplifier and its power supply. If any of the capacitors in the power supply fail, then the power supply fails, the outdoor amplifier will go down and therefore also the network connection and service to the subscriber. Most of the service requests on amplifiers are due to defective power supplies or defects caused by lightning.